Wow, Lewis is deep, very deep. I think I caught a few things. It would be good for me to read and re-read this book. I finally decided that this is a man with an incredible imagination. I am imagination-ally challenged so it is hard for me to track with him at times.
He is a master at metaphors and illustrations. Some go to depths that are hard for me to follow but others are so clear to me. He uses a phrase “intolerable compliment” to express what God has done for us by loving us. He has paid us a great compliment and with it comes God’s working in us to make us lovable. Some of that comes in the form of suffering.
Another illustration was that of an artist who can knock off a stick figure drawing for a child and be satisfied with it. But when the artist is working on a painting that he loves intensely he goes to great lengths to make sure everything is right. Scratching out this, starting over here, reworking that. If the painting could talk it would certainly wish it was just a “thumb-nails sketch” that would be finished quickly. “In the same way it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny: but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.” (page 31) This was a helpful illustration for me. Being made into the image of the Son, at least in my case, takes a lot of reworking and scratching out and making new—-which is love!
He gives good illustrations of human wickedness, the fall and then why God allows suffering. He finishes the book with a chapter on heaven because no book on pain can be without it—–it is our hope.
Jane
On the Greisen Side of Life 
You may never know just how much I needed to read this today….thank you my friend….